Studying LesBians: Studies show we are really all the same

By Natazzz on Thursday, January 20, 2011 - 20:57

Studying LesBians is a monthly column about recent (and not-so-recent) research involving lesBians or the LGBT community as a whole. This time I want to discuss two very different lines of research that both show a similar thing: we are all the same.

The last few months there's been a lot of media attention about gay bullying, gay teens committing suicide, the It Gets Better project and lots of other initiatives focusing on how tough it is to be a queer teen and what can be done to improve things.

Although no one is denying it's hard to be an LGBT teen, recent studies have shown that being a teen is hard for almost everyone!

Apparently, it's not just queer teens that are being bullied, but up to 77% of teenagers in high school report getting bullied. Teens get bullied for being a geek, or fat, or Asian, or small, or tall or anything else you can imagine. In other words, being a teenager sucks!

Other studies show that it might be hard to be a gay teen, but on average gay teens are just as (un)happy, with the same number of friends and just as many/few problems as their heterosexual peers.

These studies were all conducted in the United States, but one can assume it's sort of the same over in Europe. I like to think on average our bullying percentage is lower, but I could be biased. The point of all these studies is that they are basically saying that the teen years are (equally) hard on all teens.

A totally different line of research was pursued in a study that was published this month. It looked into the kind of regions in the brain that are involved with being in love. They came to the very surprising (!) conclusion that the same regions of the brain are involved, regardless of someone's sexual orientation. Can I get a collective 'DUH'?

What they did in this study, conducted at the University College of London and recently published on PLoS One, was do MRI scans of people using special markers, while they were looking at pictures of either their romantic partner or of pictures of their close friends.

The regions of the brain that were active while looking at these photos would light up, showing exactly which part of the brain was used.

They found that different parts of the brain were activated when looking at a romantic partner than when looking at a close friend, and this had nothing to do with either the sexual orientation of the perceiver, or with the gender of the person in the photo.